to meet it. At the same moment Baron Charles de Gillesmont sat facing his mother down the length of highly polished walnut dining table. He was peeling a peach, using a tiny mother-of-pearl handled knife to make a little unbroken whorl of golden skin. Hélène de Gillesmont’s mouth tightened with irritation as she watched him.
‘Charles,’ she said sharply, unable to bear the tense silence any longer, ‘you do not even do me the courtesy of listening to what I have to say.’ The baron looked up, laying down the peach and his knife as he did so with a gesture of infinite weariness.
‘I am so sorry that I can’t make you understand. I can’t bear to see you go on hurting yourself, and us, like this. God knows we have talked about it enough. There is no possibility, I tell you, none whatsoever, that Catherine and I can be together again. Too much has happened for us to be able to go back and take up the same old reins. And, as you know perfectly well, she is happy in Paris. And I … I am busy with what I have to do here. I don’t wish to change things, Hélène.’
The baronne clicked her tongue sharply. ‘I can understand that you are still grieved, shocked even, but defeated? My son? If only you would bring Catherine back here, make her stop all this Paris nonsense. You are her husband, after all. Then give her another child, and …’
Charles pushed back his chair with a savage jolt, knocking the table so hard that his glass fell over. A few drops of pale gold wine ran out on to the polished wood.
‘Why can’t you be quiet?’ His voice was barely more than a whisper and his face was dead white. Hélène faltered for a moment and put up a hand to adjust the smooth coil of grey-blonde hair. Her eyes avoided her son’s face until he spoke again, in a normal voice now.
‘Will you excuse me? I have to go and check whether Jacopin has left for the airport.’
‘And why,’ his mother called at his departing back, ‘must we have some foreign girl that none of us know in the house, now, of all times?’
In the doorway Charles looked back, a tired smile lifting the corners of his mouth.
‘Mama, this time is no different from any other. This is what our life is like, now. Nothing is going to change so you had better accustom yourself to it. You still have me, and Juliette, after all.’
This time the click of Hélène’s tongue was even sharper.
‘And a fine pair you are. My beautiful children, the envy of everyone, and what have you grown up into? One stubborn, cold, living like a monk, and the other no better than a hippy.’
But Charles was gone. He walked briskly down a flagged corridor to a heavy oak door. Inside, the little room was a comfortable clutter of papers, dusty bottles with torn labels, maps and rows of books. In the middle of the room, on a square of threadbare carpet, was an elegant little desk that might have been Louis XVI with an ancient black telephone perched on the top. Charles dialled a number and spoke at once.
‘Pierre? Has Jacopin taken the car to meet the young lady?’ Evidently satisfied with the reply he replaced the receiver and briskly took up a pen and a sheaf of account sheets. For a moment or two he stared intently at his work, then shrugged and leaned back in his swivel chair. From his window, at the extreme corner of the front façade of the château, he could see a sweep of manicured lawn and the curve of the gravel drive. Uncomfortable memories tugged at his consciousness as he stared unseeingly out, but he refused to admit them. Not worth starting work now, he told himself. Miss Farrer will be here within the hour, and the rest of the afternoon must be devoted to her.
He picked up a copy of La Revue de France Vinicole, tilted his chair so that he had a clear view of the driveway, and settled down to read.
Bell passed the trio of smiling hostesses at the aircraft door and stood at the top of the steel steps. Somewhere out there, underlying the airport smells of oil and rubber, she could detect the real smell of the country. It was earthy and sensuous, but clean and natural too, made up of damp leaves and rich food and woodsmoke. Even here in the airport chaos there was a feeling of calm, fertile prosperity. It was good to be back.
‘S’il vous plaît, madame,’ murmured a portly French businessman behind her, nudging her slightly with his briefcase. Bell started and hurried down the steps. She was waved through customs and her canvas bag rolled out on to the carousel within minutes. An excellent omen for the visit, she told herself, as she made for the barrier. As soon as she was through into the crowd of waiting faces, a hand touched her arm.
‘Mees Farraire?’ She turned to see, at shoulder height, the wrinkled, nut-brown Bordelais face of a little man in blue overalls and a round blue hat. She smiled down at him, feeling like a giantess.
‘That’s me.’
‘Not too flattering a photograph, if I may say so, but good enough for this purpose.’ His French was heavily accented to Bell’s Paris-educated ear, and she looked down half-bewildered at the magazine he was brandishing. It was a piece she had contributed to Decanter, decorated with a large snapshot of herself smiling rather toothily into the camera. It amused her to see it in such incongruous surroundings.
‘Where on earth did you get that?’
‘Oh, monsieur thinks of everything. You’ll see. This way to the car, madame. My name is Jacopin, by the way. Welcome to Bordeaux.’
Baron Charles’s car was a capacious brand-new grey Mercedes, veiled with a thick layer of whitish dust. Jacopin tossed her case into the boot and she sank into the passenger seat with a sigh of pleasure. The car swept along with the tiny man craning disconcertingly to see over the top of the long bonnet. Bell glimpsed the ugly, modern outskirts of the old grey town and then they were purring north-westwards into the fabulous country of the Haut-Médoc.
Under her breath, like a litany, Bell found that she was repeating the sonorous Château names as they passed. From here, from vines growing in this flat, undistinguished countryside, came the most famous, elegant wines in the world. To the right and left of the road stretched the green sea of vines, all carrying their precious bunches of grapes peacefully ripening in the August sun. Occasionally she glimpsed the bulk of a Château behind its wrought-iron gates, or screened by a protective belt of trees. Sometimes the flat gleam of the River Gironde appeared to their right, reflecting the hard blue of the summer sky. It was a peaceful, unspectacular, almost deserted landscape at this time of year, turning inwards to soak up the sun before the feverish bustle of the vintage when the grapes would be picked.
Jacopin shot a glance at Bell.
‘You know our country well?’ he asked, conversationally. Bell wrenched her attention from the clustering châteaux around the town of Margaux to answer him.
‘Not well. I’ve been a visitor three or four times, but always in a party of other journalists. This is my first visit to Château Reynard, and my first chance to spend a little time looking closely at the workings of a single château. I’m looking forward to it enormously,’ she added, truthfully. Jacopin nodded sagely.
‘Of course,’ he murmured, as if he could imagine no better place for her to be.
They drove on. Past the villages of St Julien (‘Ducru-Beaucaillou, Léoville-Barton, Léoville-Poyferré …’ murmured Bell), the landscape began to swell a little, rising to rolling mounds that were the closest that this open countryside came to hills. At last they were driving through the commune of Pauillac towards the little hill where Château Reynard dominated the surrounding acres of vines. Bell, still counting off the names, knew that
